


the love it took

by gone_girl



Series: the last great pirate king [2]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:40:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24810961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gone_girl/pseuds/gone_girl
Summary: Under stories of cruelty, under layers and layers of the mythos of Captain Flint and Princess Madi, under a tropical Florida sky, there is a two-room hut, with an orange tree in front.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw & Madi, Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton
Series: the last great pirate king [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1794574
Comments: 7
Kudos: 48





	the love it took

Stories cannot account for all the love it took to write them. Very few know of the torture of Thomas Hamilton, or the killing of Miranda Barlow, but millions know of the horrors wrought by the dread Captain Flint. But perhaps it’s better that way. If a legend passed between reverent mouths could carry love half as well as it carries fear, Captain Flint and Princess Madi after him might not cut such terrifying figures across the seas they rightfully rule.

But such as it is, nobody questions an order from Madi, believing her design to be a great and terrible one. It is impossible for her subjects to realize that perhaps their Princess, the last great pirate king, only wants to see her old friend again.

Madi personally seeks out the old king of the coastal Florida community, with one shot out eye, and asks of him a favor. He gives her that same gentle, earnest smile, and obliges her without a second thought.

James and Thomas build themselves a tiny house a half mile away from the maroon community. 

James stakes out a garden behind it. He drags sword-callused hands stubbornly through the earth until, at long last, it yields to him, relinquishes potatoes and carrots and okra and beets. Flushed with pride, he sets down an orange tree in front of their little home, finally letting sweetness cast a cool shadow over them.

Thomas beats a path into town, all on his own. His feet carry him back and forth once, twice, thrice a day. He trades, talks, comes to know and is known in return. He gathers with the townspeople when they laugh and drink at the end of a long day, and he addresses the king as his own. He finds he has an affinity for carpentry, and so dedicates himself to building with his hands where his words had failed.

Madi returns, sooner rather than later.

She rides a gentle-moving horse along Thomas’s path, ties it down and hits the ground heavily when she dismounts. She moves slower now, more purposeful, holds herself taller. She is careful not to tear open still-healing wounds. James straightens from his vegetables, shucks off his gloves, and doesn’t speak a single word before enfolding her in an embrace.

A pirate and a gardener can love each other dearly.

“Flint,” Madi breathes, relieved as though she has just discovered that he still lives.

“Madi,” he replies. He is not quite smiling, but there is so much joy and affection in every groove of his worn face that it seems radiant as the sun.

He makes her herbal tea, and they sit together inside. James sees the way Madi winces slightly as she sits down, sees the bruises that bloom on her collarbone, and he raises an eyebrow.

“Comfrey salve,” he says. “For dull pain.”

“And for sharp?” Madi asks.

James sips from his cup. “I’m afraid only time will soothe that.”

Madi takes her cup from the table and drinks from it. They sit in companionable silence. It’s a nice silence. Something only the two of them shared.

“Is Thomas in town?” Madi says. It’s a small house, only two rooms, and they are the only two people inside it.

“Yes,” James says. His voice is soft in a way Madi has never heard before, had once never thought possible. “He is not one for solitude.” He smiles. “Thomas takes wonderfully to people.”

“Is that so?” Madi says, amused.

James almost laughs. “In quite a more honest way, I assure you.”

“Undoubtedly,” says Madi, her tone carefully measured. She takes a deep breath, and speaks again before James can do something awful like ask her if she’s all right. “Are you happy?”

James closes his eyes like he was expecting the question, and was desperately hoping she wouldn’t ask it. “I might be, one day,” he says at last. “Being at peace is not the same thing as being happy.”

“I think I understand that,” Madi says after a moment.

“You don’t,” James says quietly. “But you will. Ten years, I raged for Thomas. Hardly six months for Miranda. I simply don’t have another ten years left in me. So. Two parts of a set of three may never reach happiness, but peace is… well, that is something that already lives here.”

They lapse into silence again.

“I cannot give up,” Madi says. “I can’t.”

“I would expect nothing less,” James says. “But you cannot do it alone.”

“I know.”

“That is why-”

“I know,” Madi cuts him off, her eyes sharp. He looks back at her, waiting, and she deflates. She even manages to smile. “I suppose I should choose better this time around, shouldn’t I?”

“It isn’t weakness to still love him,” James says. If Madi was a less observant woman, she would not notice the way his knuckles are white around his cup. 

“You would say so,” Madi says, studying him. “I have never known Captain Flint to admit much in the way of weakness.”

“A good captain never does,” James says. Abruptly, he looks very like his old self again, a cunning glint in his eye and the set of his jaw sharp. Madi sits up straighter in her chair.

“I sail under your banner now,” she informs him.

“I know,” James says. “I would expect nothing less.” It is so familiar, how he is speaking, sharp, almost cold, but with a critical note of approval.

Then he softens again, and he is an aging man in a rocking chair, sipping from a cup of mint tea.

Madi leaves behind six books. They bring them to the building in the center of town, where hundreds of books are already housed. James sits in the library, reading them one after another.

A child approaches James. Thomas winces and moves forward to pull the child away, bring her to her parents, but James shuts his book. He tells her a story about bloodthirsty redcoats, a battle with a tempest, madness caused by the sun in a beautiful cloudless sky, deadly sharks the size of horses. He has gathered quite a crowd by the time he finishes.

James goes to the library every few days, bringing a basket of oranges to hand to children as he tells them stories. Thomas’s path becomes well-worn, well-loved. Madi returns and laughs out loud to see the way children cling to James.

Madi stays long enough for dinner this time. She and Thomas get along well enough, although James remembers when they were both young and naive and talkative, and knows that they might have been the best of friends, in a different life.

In the evening, Thomas retires, giving them the front room to talk. They don’t, much. A monarch, a captain, a tyrant- of all the titles they might share, every one has required a deadly use of words. It’s nice, peaceful even, to set that weapon down.

“I hear stories of you,” James says.

“Lovely ones, I hope,” Madi replies, laughing a little.

“Of course,” James says, hiding his smile behind his teacup. “How is the sea, without me on it?”

“Delightful,” Madi says. “Do you know, it’s really very simple to be the bane of England without you underfoot?”

James can’t resist laughing at that. “Well, I suppose I’ll just take my banner back, then.”

“To mop your floor with?” Madi asks dryly.

“I should throw you out for your disrespect to Captain Flint,” James says, and Madi smiles.

“Is this happiness, yet?” she asks after a long moment. “Have you reached it?”

James’s smile slips, becomes smaller and sadder. “Indulge an old man,” he says. “Tell me how you’ve captained my ship.”

Madi tells him. She isn’t quite as gifted a storyteller as James or Silver, but James seems to enjoy it all the same, drinks it in almost as though he misses it. Almost.

When he watches her leave, he feels just the same way as Miranda did, years ago.

James begins growing comfrey in his garden. He cuts up the leaves for the oil. He keeps the fire burning all night under his pot, so that the infusion will be complete. He fills a basket of vegetables he pulled from the earth with his hands, trades it for beeswax. He watches the beeswax melt together with the oil. He pours it into a shallow box, careful not to burn himself. Madi carries the box with her everywhere she goes.

The existence of Captain Flint, alive and well on a humid Florida coast, does not catch in the thicket of legend surrounding the three of them, the monarch, the captain, the tyrant. It couldn’t. It simply would not fit. How would the stories reconcile it? Who would accept that the brutal and cruel Captain sat over a simmering pot for hours just so that someone he loved would not feel their bruises so dully? Who would believe that the great and ruthless Princess would abandon her kingdom, even for a day, even for three or four days a year?

But perhaps it’s better that way.


End file.
